Page:Angna Enters - Among the Daughters.djvu/405

 won't face the fact that the world has changed and that new forms have displaced the old."

"Yes," put in Ilona earnestly, clenching both hands, "and it is up to the new artists to dominate, to take a whip to the audience."

The orange embroidered border of her long full-sleeved Prussian-blue robe was one of those geometric patterns he had seen somewhere in a book of lessons in elementary design—a high school textbook.

"Don't Nietzsche me—I saw a maniac named Hitler foaming at the mouth in Nuremberg with pseudo-Nietzschean palaver and Wagnerian overtones that would have driven Friedrich nuts a second time," he said crossly. He had intended to shut up but the pathetic dancer had started another train of thought. "Perhaps it's an aftermath of the war but there's a messianic panacea mania abroad these days. It takes many forms—religious, political, aesthetic—but the over-all overtone is sexual. The messiah is either undersexed or oversexed and comes forward with some verbal mumbo-jumbo about the primitive hungers of the blood. In France—at Rambouillet—there's a guy, a Slav, who has set himself up with a Tibetan rigmarole of occult gibberish and physical exercise—as a deus ex machina for artists and writers who for one reason or another are in a state of mental ill-health and want a yes answer to their doubts. This guy's a kind of high-class Coué—"

"I think that's an unfair description of Pergov," broke in Vent, "and his work in Rambouillet. He tries to teach those who come to him to learn what their true selves are, to strip away that which is false in themselves, and then to go on from there to say yes in their inner development."

"I've seen some of the results of Rambouillet—this taking of a mental whip to a human being's spirit and subduing it so that it emerges broken—because first it has to be submerged in the so-called teacher's all-knowing will. I believe there's too much acceptance today—in the arts as well as human relationships of the notion of domination. In painting some artist who can only paint in a certain manner—which may be valid—has to construct some aesthetic gibberish which denies all other contemporary painting, and he attracts a number of individuals who have just about exhausted the palaver of a previous messiah. But the worst aspect of all this is the domination of the human being such as the Hitler-Pergov manifestation. It's something like what happens in the bull ring—man considered only as an animal. I am a bullfight aficionado—I suppose Rh